Sermon 1. Intellect, the
Instrument of Religious Training

"And when He came nigh to the gate of the
city, behold, a dead man was carried out, the only
son of his mother: and she was a widow." Luke
vii. 12.

{1} THIS day we celebrate one of the most remarkable
feasts in the calendar. We commemorate a Saint who gained
the heavenly crown by prayers indeed and tears, by
sleepless nights and weary wanderings, but not in the
administration of any high office in the Church, not in
the fulfilment of some great resolution or special
counsel; not as a preacher, teacher, evangelist,
reformer, or champion of the faith; not as Bishop of the
flock, or temporal governor; not by eloquence, by wisdom,
or by controversial success; not in the way of any other
saint whom we invoke in the circle of the year; but as a
mother, seeking and gaining by her penances the
conversion of her son. It was for no ordinary son that
she {2} prayed, and it was no ordinary supplication by which
she gained him. When a holy man saw its vehemence, ere it
was successful, he said to her, "Go in peace; the
son of such prayers cannot perish." The prediction
was fulfilled beyond its letter; not only was that young
man converted, but after his conversion he became a
saint; not only a saint, but a doctor also, and
"instructed many unto justice." St. Augustine
was the son for whom she prayed; and if he has been a
luminary for all ages of the Church since, many thanks do
we owe to his mother, St. Monica, who having borne him in
the flesh, travailed for him in the spirit.

The Church, in her choice of a gospel for this feast,
has likened St. Monica to the desolate widow whom our
Lord met at the gate of the city, as she was going forth
to bury the corpse of her only son. He saw her, and said,
"Weep not;" and he touched the bier, and the
dead arose. St. Monica asked and obtained a more noble
miracle. Many a mother who is anxious for her son's
bodily welfare, neglects his soul. So did not the Saint
of today; her son might be accomplished, eloquent, able,
and distinguished; all this was nothing to her while he
was dead in God's sight, while he was the slave of sin,
while he was the prey of heresy. She desired his true
life. She wearied heaven with prayer, and wore out
herself with praying; she did not at once prevail. He
left his home; he was carried forward by his four
bearers, ignorance, pride, appetite, and ambition; he was
carried out into a foreign land, he crossed over from
Africa to Italy. She followed him, she followed the
corpse, the chief, the only mourner; she went where {3} he
went, from city to city. It was nothing to her to leave
her dear home and her native soil; she had no country
below; her sole rest, her sole repose, her Nunc
dimittis, was his new birth. So while she still
walked forth in her deep anguish and isolation, and her
silent prayer, she was at length rewarded by the
long-coveted miracle. Grace melted the proud heart, and
purified the corrupt breast of Augustine, and restored
and comforted his mother; and hence, in today's Collect,
the Almighty Giver is especially addressed as
"Mœrentium consolator et in Te sperantium
salus"; the consoler of those that mourn, and the
health of those who hope.

And thus Monica, as the widow in the gospel, becomes
an image of Holy Church, who is ever lamenting over her
lost children, and by her importunate prayers, ever
recovering them from the grave of sin; and to Monica, as
the Church's representative, may be addressed those words
of the Prophet: "Put off, O Jerusalem, the garments
of thy mourning and affliction; arise, and look about
towards the East, and behold thy children; for they went
out from thee on foot, led by the enemies; but the Lord
will bring them to thee exalted with honour, as children
of the kingdom."

This, I say, is not a history of past time merely, but
of every age. Generation passes after generation, and
there is on the one side the same doleful, dreary
wandering, the same feverish unrest, the same fleeting
enjoyments, the same abiding and hopeless misery; and on
the other, the same anxiously beating heart of impotent
affection. Age goes after age, and still Augustine rushes
forth again and again, with his young ambition, {4} and his
intellectual energy, and his turbulent appetites;
educated, yet untaught; with powers strengthened,
sharpened, refined by exercise, but unenlightened and
untrained,goes forth into the world, ardent,
self-willed, reckless, headstrong, inexperienced, to fall
into the hands of those who seek his life, and to become
the victim of heresy and sin. And still, again and again
does hapless Monica weep; weeping for that dear child who
grew up with her from the womb, and of whom she is now
robbed; of whom she has lost sight; wandering with him in
his wanderings, following his steps in her imagination,
cherishing his image in her heart, keeping his name upon
her lips, and feeling withal, that, as a woman, she is
unable to cope with the violence and the artifices of the
world. And still again and again does Holy Church take
her part and her place, with a heart as tender and more
strong, with an arm, and an eye, and an intellect more
powerful than hers, with an influence more than human,
more sagacious than the world, and more religious than
home, to restrain and reclaim those whom passion, or
example, or sophistry is hurrying forward to destruction.

My Brethren, there is something happy in the
circumstance, that the first Sunday of our academical
worship should fall on the feast of St. Monica. For is
not this one chief aspect of a University, and an aspect
which it especially bears in this sacred place, to supply
that which that memorable Saint so much desiderated, and
for which she attempted to compensate by her prayers? Is
it not one part of our especial office to receive those
from the hands of father and mother, whom {5} father and
mother can keep no longer? Thus, while professing all
sciences, and speaking by the mouths of philosophers and
sages, a University delights in the well-known
appellation of "Alma Mater." She is a mother
who, after the pattern of that greatest and most heavenly
of mothers, is, on the one hand, "Mater
Amabilis," and "Causa nostrę lętitię,"
and on the other, "Sedes Sapientię" also. She
is a mother, living, not in the seclusion of the family,
and in the garden's shade, but in the wide world, in the
populous and busy town, claiming, like our great Mother,
the meek and tender Mary, "to praise her own self,
and to glory, and to open her mouth," because she
alone has "compassed the circuit of Heaven, and
penetrated into the bottom of the deep, and walked upon
the waves of the sea," and in every department of
human learning, is able to confute and put right those
who would set knowledge against itself, and would make
truth contradict truth, and would persuade the world
that, to be religious, you must be ignorant, and to be
intellectual, you must be unbelieving.

My meaning will be clearer, if I revert to the nature
and condition of the human mind. The human mind, as you
know, my Brethren, may be regarded from two principal
points of view, as intellectual and as moral. As
intellectual, it apprehends truth; as moral, it
apprehends duty. The perfection of the intellect is
called ability and talent; the perfection of our moral
nature is virtue. And it is our great misfortune here,
and our trial, that, as things are found in the world,
the two are separated, and independent of each other;
that, where power of {6} intellect is, there need not be
virtue; and that where right, and goodness, and moral
greatness are, there need not be talent. It was not so in
the beginning; not that our nature is essentially
different from what it was when first created; but that
the Creator, upon its creation, raised it above itself by
a supernatural grace, which blended together all its
faculties, and made them conspire into one whole, and act
in common towards one end; so that, had the race
continued in that blessed state of privilege, there never
would have been distance, rivalry, hostility between one
faculty and another. It is otherwise now; so much the
worse for us;the grace is gone; the soul cannot
hold together; it falls to pieces; its elements strive
with each other. And as, when a kingdom has long been in
a state of tumult, sedition, or rebellion, certain
portions break off from the whole and from the central
government, and set up for themselves; so is it with the soul of man. So is it, I say, with the soul, long
ago,that a number of small kingdoms, independent of
each other and at war with each other, have arisen in it,
such and so many as to reduce the original sovereignty to
a circuit of territory and to an influence not more
considerable than they have themselves. And all these
small dominions, as I may call them, in the soul, are, of
course, one by one, incomplete and defective, strong in
some points, weak in others, because not any one of them
is the whole, sufficient for itself, but only one part of
the whole, which, on the contrary, is made up of all the
faculties of the soul together. Hence you find in one
man, or one set of men, the reign, I may call it, the
acknowledged {7} reign of passion or appetite; among others,
the avowed reign of brute strength and material
resources; among others, the reign of intellect; and
among others (and would they were many!) the more
excellent reign of virtue. Such is the state of things,
as it shows to us, when we cast our eyes abroad into the
world; and every one, when he comes to years of
discretion, and begins to think, has all these separate
powers warring in his own breast,appetite, passion,
secular ambition, intellect, and conscience, and trying
severally to get possession of him. And when he looks out
of himself, he sees them all severally embodied on a
grand scale, in large establishments and centres, outside
of him, one here and another there, in aid of that
importunate canvass, so to express myself, which each of
them is carrying on within him. And thus, at least for a
time, he is in a state of internal strife, confusion, and
uncertainty, first attracted this way, then that, not
knowing how to choose, though sooner or later choose he
must; or rather, he must choose soon, and cannot choose
late, for he cannot help thinking, speaking, and acting;
and to think, speak, and act, is to choose.

This is a very serious state of things; and what makes
it worse is, that these various faculties and powers of
the human mind have so long been separated from each
other, so long cultivated and developed each by itself,
that it comes to be taken for granted that they cannot be
united; and it is commonly thought, because some men
follow duty, others pleasure, others glory, and others
intellect, therefore that one of these things excludes
the other; that duty cannot be pleasant, {8} that virtue
cannot be intellectual, that goodness cannot be great,
that conscientiousness cannot be heroic; and the fact is
often so, I grant, that there is a separation,
though I deny its necessity. I grant, that, from the
disorder and confusion into which the human mind has
fallen, too often good men are not attractive, and bad
men are; too often cleverness, or wit, or taste, or
richness of fancy, or keenness of intellect, or depth, or
knowledge, or pleasantness and agreeableness, is on the
side of error and not on the side of virtue. Excellence,
as things are, does lie, I grant, in more directions than
one, and it is ever easier to excel in one thing than in
two. If then a man has more talent, there is the chance
that he will have less goodness; if he is careful about
his religious duties, there is the chance he is
behind-hand in general knowledge; and in matter of fact,
in particular cases, persons may be found, correct and
virtuous, who are heavy, narrow-minded, and
unintellectual, and again, unprincipled men, who are
brilliant and amusing. And thus you see, my Brethren, how
that particular temptation comes about, of which I speak,
when boyhood is past, and youth is opening;not only
is the soul plagued and tormented by the thousand
temptations which rise up within it, but it is exposed
moreover to the sophistry of the Evil One, whispering
that duty and religion are very right indeed, admirable,
supernatural,who doubts it?but that, somehow
or other, religious people are commonly either very dull
or very tiresome: nay, that religion itself after all is
more suitable to women and children, who live at home,
than to men. {9}

O my Brethren, do you not confess to the truth of much
of what I have been saying? Is it not so, that, when your
mind began to open, in proportion as it opened, it was by
that very opening made rebellious against what you knew
to be duty? In matter of fact, was not your intellect in
league with disobedience? Instead of uniting knowledge
and religion, as you might have done, did you not set one
against the other? For instance, was it not one of the
first voluntary exercises of your mind, to indulge a
wrong curiosity?a curiosity which you confessed to
yourselves to be wrong, which went against your
conscience, while you indulged it. You desired to know a
number of things, which it could do you no good to know.
This is how boys begin; as soon as their mind begins to
stir, it looks the wrong way, and runs upon what is evil.
This is their first wrong step; and their next use of
their intellect is to put what is evil into words: this
is their second wrong step. They form images, and
entertain thoughts, which should be away, and they stamp
them upon themselves and others by expressing them. And
next, the bad turn which they do to others, others
retaliate on them. One wrong speech provokes another; and
thus there grows up among them from boyhood that
miserable tone of conversation,hinting and
suggesting evil, jesting, bantering on the subject of
sin, supplying fuel for the inflammable
imagination,which lasts through life, which is
wherever the world is, which is the very breath of the
world, which the world cannot do without, which the world
"speaks out of the abundance of its heart," and
which you may {10} prophesy will prevail in every ordinary
assemblage of men, as soon as they are at their ease and
begin to talk freely,a sort of vocal worship of the
Evil One, to which the Evil One listens with special
satisfaction, because he looks on it as the preparation
for worse sin; for from bad thoughts and bad words
proceed bad deeds.

Bad company creates a distaste for good; and hence it
happens that, when a youth has gone the length I have
been supposing, he is repelled, from that very distaste,
from those places and scenes which would do him good. He
begins to lose the delight he once had in going home. By
little and little he loses his enjoyment in the pleasant
countenances, and untroubled smiles, and gentle ways, of
that family circle which is so dear to him still. At
first he says to himself that he is not worthy of them,
and therefore keeps away; but at length the routine of
home is tiresome to him. He has aspirations and ambitions
which home does not satisfy. He wants more than home can
give. His curiosity now takes a new turn; he listens to
views and discussions which are inconsistent with the
sanctity of religious faith. At first he has no
temptation to adopt them; only he wishes to know what is
"said." As time goes on, however, living with
companions who have no fixed principle, and who, if they
do not oppose, at least do not take for granted, any the
most elementary truths; or worse, hearing or reading what
is directly against religion, at length, without being
conscious of it, he admits a sceptical influence upon his
mind. He does not know it, he does not recognize it, but
there it is; and, before he recognizes it, it
leads {11} him to a fretful, impatient way of speaking of the
persons, conduct, words, and measures of religious men or
of men in authority. This is the way in which he relieves
his mind of the burden which is growing heavier and
heavier every day. And so he goes on, approximating more
and more closely to sceptics and infidels, and feeling
more and more congeniality with their modes of thinking,
till some day suddenly, from some accident, the fact
breaks upon him, and he sees clearly that he is an
unbeliever himself.

He can no longer conceal from himself that he does not
believe, and a sharp anguish darts through him, and for a
time he is made miserable; next, he laments
indeed that former undoubting faith, which he has lost,
but as some pleasant dream;a dream, though a
pleasant one, from which he has been awakened, but which,
however pleasant, he forsooth, cannot help being
a dream. And his next stage is to experience a great
expansion and elevation of mind; for his field of view is
swept clear of all that filled it from childhood, and now
he may build up for himself anything he pleases instead.
So he begins to form his own ideas of things, and these
please and satisfy him for a time; then he gets used to
them, and tires of them, and he takes up others; and now
he has begun that everlasting round of seeking and never
finding: at length, after various trials, he gives up the
search altogether, and decides that nothing can be known,
and there is no such thing as truth, and that if anything
is to be professed, the creed he started from is as good
as any other, and has more claims;however, that
really nothing is true, nothing is certain. Or, if he {12} be
of a more ardent temperature, or, like Augustine, the
object of God's special mercy, then he cannot give up the
inquiry, though he has no chance of solving it, and he
roams about, "walking through dry places, seeking
rest, and finding none." Meanwhile poor Monica sees
the change in its effects, though she does not estimate
it in itself, or know exactly what it is, or how it came
about: nor, even though it be told her, can she enter
into it, or understand how one, so dear to her, can be
subjected to it. But a dreadful change there is, and she
perceives it too clearly; a dreadful change for him and
for her; a wall of separation has grown up between them:
she cannot throw it down again; but she can turn to her
God, and weep and pray.

Now, my Brethren, observe, the strength of this
delusion lies in there being a sort of truth in it. Young
men feel a consciousness of certain faculties within them
which demand exercise, aspirations which must have an
object, for which they do not commonly find exercise or
object in religious circles. This want is no excuse for
them, if they think, say, or do anything against faith or
morals: but still it is the occasion of their sinning. It
is the fact, they are not only moral, they are
intellectual beings; but, ever since the fall of man,
religion is here, and philosophy is there; each has its
own centres of influence, separate from the other;
intellectual men desiderate something in the homes of
religion, and religious men desiderate something in the
schools of science.

Here, then, I conceive, is the object of the Holy See
and the Catholic Church in setting up Universities; it {13} is
to reunite things which were in the beginning joined
together by God, and have been put asunder by man. Some
persons will say that I am thinking of confining,
distorting, and stunting the growth of the intellect by
ecclesiastical supervision. I have no such thought. Nor
have I any thought of a compromise, as if religion must
give up something, and science something. I wish the
intellect to range with the utmost freedom, and religion
to enjoy an equal freedom; but what I am stipulating for
is, that they should be found in one and the same place,
and exemplified in the same persons. I want to destroy
that diversity of centres, which puts everything into
confusion by creating a contrariety of influences. I wish
the same spots and the same individuals to be at once
oracles of philosophy and shrines of devotion. It will
not satisfy me, what satisfies so many, to have two
independent systems, intellectual and religious, going at
once side by side, by a sort of division of labour, and
only accidentally brought together. It will not satisfy
me, if religion is here, and science there, and young men
converse with science all day, and lodge with religion in
the evening. It is not touching the evil, to which these
remarks have been directed, if young men eat and drink
and sleep in one place, and think in another: I want the
same roof to contain both the intellectual and moral
discipline. Devotion is not a sort of finish given to the
sciences; nor is science a sort of feather in the cap, if
I may so express myself, an ornament and set-off to
devotion. I want the intellectual layman to be religious,
and the devout ecclesiastic to be intellectual. {14}

This is no matter of terms, nor of subtle
distinctions. Sanctity has its influence; intellect has
its influence; the influence of sanctity is the greater
on the long run; the influence of intellect is greater at
the moment. Therefore, in the case of the young, whose
education lasts a few years, where the intellect is, there
is the influence. Their literary, their scientific
teachers, really have the forming of them. Let both
influences act freely, and then, as a general rule, no
system of mere religious guardianship which neglects the
Reason, will in matter of fact succeed against the
School. Youths need a masculine religion, if it is to
carry captive their restless imaginations, and their wild
intellects, as well as to touch their susceptible hearts.

Look down then upon us from Heaven, O blessed Monica,
for we are engaged in supplying that very want which
called for thy prayers, and gained for thee thy crown.
Thou who didst obtain thy son's conversion by the merit
of thy intercession, continue that intercession for us,
that we may be blest, as human instruments, in the use of
those human means by which ordinarily the Holy Cross is
raised aloft, and religion commands the world. Gain for
us, first, that we may intensely feel that God's grace is
all in all, and that we are nothing; next, that, for His
greater glory, and for the honour of Holy Church, and for
the good of man, we may be "zealous for all the
better gifts," and may excel in intellect as we
excel in virtue.

(Feast of St. MonicaSunday after Ascension, 1856.
Preached in the University Church, Dublin.)